Pycon 2014 - Montreal
I’ve always loved developing in Python, specially after working on QSTK and at Lucena and Coursera. This year I was finally able to make it to PyCon in Montreal, Canada with the help of Python Software Foundation and Coursera.
It was great talking to some many other people who share the same love for the language that I do. It was a great learning experience and a gentle reminder that I still have a long way to go. Talking to Guido was the highlight of the conference for me.
I was with a few co-workers from Coursera as company sponsors. We use a fair amount of python (Django, Fabric, IPython, and the scientific python stack) at work. We were excited to show off our Python courses and let others know about the challenging engineering work we get to do out here in Mountain View, California.
As an engineer working here in the Bay Area I don’t often get to see the true global impact of my work, so hearing stories from students from all different backgrounds was rewarding. We were extremely humbled by how many people were seeking out education on the Coursera platform and pushing themselves to succeed.
In between my time at the Coursera booth, I would try and attend as many of the great talks at the conference. A few of the talks that I was able to attend were Graham Dumpleton’s talk on Advanced methods of creating decorators, Tres Seaver’s talk - By Your Bootstraps: Porting Your Application to Python3, and It’s Dangerous to Go Alone: Battling the Invisible Monsters of Tech by Julie Pagano.
The shoutout from Jessica McKellar during the keynote was really the cherry-on-top, solidifying the work that I do here at Coursera and the things we can give back as a company to the Python community at large.
See you all at PyCon 2015!